Akarui mirai (futuro brillante) : Representación urbana y fantasmagoría del pasado en el Japón contemporáneo

After hosting a strategic U. S. military base over the past half century, the city of Tachikawa (western Tokyo) undergoes a process of urban reinvention seeking to overcome its historical image as bēsu taun (base town). With this goal, local administration and real estate companies draw a discursive landscape where the past vanishes in the representation of the present. In this representational project, the writing of foreign words in katakana script plays a central role. The paper explores ethnographically this linguistic construction by means of a personal walk through the experience of a collective oblivion. Ultimately, the reflection upon this experience reveals the hidden tensions that underlie the transformation of the new Tachikawa.